Just to wish everyone a very Happy St Andrews day, its starting to get bigger each year and now the kids have started to get school holidays, it should be recognised as a National holiday and for us all to think of our roots in Scotland and feel proud to come from such a beautiful country and to be Scottish and proud.

Digital TapestryLagoon Leisure Centre/Paisley Town HallA multimedia presentation of Scotland in the 21st Century through the eyes of young people in Renfrewshire projected onto Paisley Town Hall.

The History of St Andrew of Scotland:

Saint Andrew (who is believed to have later preached around the shores of the Black Sea), was an agile and hardy Galilean fisherman whose name means ‘Strong’ and who also had good social skills. He brought the first foreigners to meet Jesus and shamed a large crowd of people into sharing their food with the people beside them. Today we might describe him as the Patron Saint of Social Networking!

Having Saint Andrew as Scotland’s Patron gave the country several advantages: because he was the brother of Saint Peter, founder of the Church, the Scots were able to appeal to the Pope in 1320 (The Declaration of Arbroath) for protection against the attempts of English kings to conquer the Scots. Traditionally, Scots also claimed that they were descended from the Scythians who lived on the shores of the Black Sea in what is now Romania and Bulgaria and were converted by Saint Andrew.

In the fascinating legend of The Voyage of St Rule from Greece to Scotland we can see the complicated spread of devotion to Saint Andrew — from Constantinople in modern Turkey, to St Andrews in Fife. St Rule (Regulus in Latin) and the six nuns and monks who took the long sea-journey with him, stands for the missionaries and monasteries who worked long and hard to bring the Good News to Britain. They lived in communities organised by a monastic Rule — hence the name St Rule or Regulus.

As Scotland slowly became a nation it needed a national symbol to rally round and motivate the country. Saint Andrew was an inspired choice and the early Picts and Scots modelled themselves on Saint Andrew and on one of his strong supporters, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, whose statue you can see today in York, where the he visited his father, a Roman General then trying to force the Picts to go back north.